A Glitch in the System
by Nenalata
Summary: Remember how in the first Tree of Tranquility, Calvin's five-heart scene was glitched, so that if you tried to exit the mine, the game would freeze with Calvin's staring, smiling face? Ever wonder what happened to Angela, trapped in that mine forever...?


"Apple," Angela muttered under her breath as she stomped towards the mine stairs. "Right. I come all the way down here and he asks for an _apple_. That's cool. I don't mind." Evident by her sarcastic mutterings, Angela was _pissed_. She wasn't exactly Waffle Island's Next Top Miner, so coming all the way down here had been, well, a bitch. Naturally, the first thing Calvin would ask for would be an _apple_ of all things. Just because she was a farmer did _not_ mean she had fresh apples on hand! Well, to tell the truth, she _did_ have a few apples saved from last fall's harvest, but still, it was offensive. And Calvin knew this. She was sure she could feel his grin as the earthquake happened.  
>Whoops, not <em>earthquake<em>; she meant to say _angry farmer walking towards the mine stairs_—  
>But the mine stairs weren't there.<br>Never mind, 'earthquake' was correct.  
>Angela could only stare up in horror as the floors above her collapsed and rocks slid about veins of precious stones and minerals shattered. She dove out of the way as a particularly large boulder fell on top of the rickety wooden stairs, crushing them all the way down to the 10th floor. More rocks followed, building on top of one another until the opening above where the stairs <em>oh Goddess<em> used to be, just obscuring any way out.  
><em>Just obscuring.<em> Not completely. They'd filled it up to the point where they were trapped, but not so much that a pretty healthy amount of air couldn't flow through. Just enough for them to suffer for all of eternity, as compared to quickly dying in peace.  
>Dread pooled cold and suffocating in Angela's stomach as she stared up at the tragedy that had given them torture rather than death. She knew she looked ridiculous, sitting on her bottom with her legs splayed, but frankly, looks were the least of her issues.<br>She heard footsteps behind her and dazedly looked up to see Calvin staring just as she was. He nervously rubbed the brim of his cowboy hat as if the touch calmed him, but the distinctly not-calmed expression that had planted itself on his face was a disturbing, twitching smile.  
>Twitch, twitch, twitch. Like each twitch was counting the many, many seconds they had left until they could die.<p>

* * *

><p>It was at least half an hour that the pair stared in silence before Calvin finally broke it. "Well!" he said, much too cheerfully for the situation. "This is just another adventure, isn't it?"<br>The sudden noise in the condemning silence broke Angela out of her stupor. "Oh Goddess, Calvin, what are we going to do, we're trapped here, oh we're going to die but it'll take forever oh Goddess Calvin what are we going to do what are we going to die we're going to die Calvin—"  
>"Angela!" She didn't stop her babbling, so Calvin leaned down, grabbed ahold of her shoulders, and shook her gently, then not so gently, then roughly. Her head lolled back and she began hyperventilating instead of talking. "Angela, breathe slower. Slower, Angela! Calm down. We're not going to die." His still-twitching smile was not as reassuring as one would think.<br>"I know, and that makes it worse! Neither of us would be willing to give up food long enough—"  
>Calvin frowned, and the expression thankfully stopped his creepy grin. "Speaking of which, what do you have in your rucksack? Anything we can use? I have some food, but it won't last long…"<br>Angela laughed a little crazily. "Of course I do; I'm a farmer! Of course I always have something to eat…" Her laughter continued bubbling out of her, and the giggles bounced off the walls and back, like there were a thousand panicking Angelas instead of one. "Except an apple!" she shrieked. "I have everything in my pack _except an apple, Calvin!_ This is _your_ fault!"  
>Calvin ignored her. "Food, Angela," he repeated. "Do you have any food?"<br>She calmed down almost instantly. "Yeah, I do." She shrugged her pack off her shoulders and began rifling around in it. "Let's see…I have some marmalade, a few loaves of herb bread, different kinds of jam, a bunch of trail mix, some sunflower seeds—" She gasped and put a hand to her mouth in surprise. "Oh, Calvin! Who will take care of my farm while we're trapped?"  
>"I'm sure someone will think to do that," Calvin was quick to assure her. "What else do you have?"<br>"Uh…I've a spare change of clothes, a sewing kit—hey, we could use these to make blankets or something. Anyway, I have different kinds of mining gear, too, like packets of herbal tea, cold medicine, Stay Awake, Bodigizer, you know. I kind of empty out the clinic before I come out here."  
>"Mining gear? Like grapples and stuff?"<br>"No, I just use my farm tools. That means we also have a hoe, sickle, watering can, fishing rod, hammer, axe, shears, and a milking tool. Oh, my poor animals!"  
>Calvin blinked. "That's a lot of stuff to keep in a rucksack."<br>"Yeah, Shelly upgrades it a lot. It's pretty big. What do you have?"  
>Calvin grinned self-consciously. "Well, I'm just a drifter, so I don't carry around as much, but…let me check." He began rifling in his pockets and jacket and under his cowboy hat. Wait, cowboy hat? "Um, I got some bottled water, a bunch of preserved food like you…Uh, got a hammer, a machete, a little emergency stove, a little bit of rope, some first aid stuff, and a map of this mine, kind of like the one from outside. Oh, and some travel toiletries."<br>"Like what?"  
>"You know, shampoo, soap, dental stuff, foldable comb…You know."<br>Still, a machete seemed the most random thing to keep under your literal hat. Whatever.  
>"Wait, you have a map?" An idea was slowly forming in Angela's mind. Not a rescue plan, but it was good enough.<br>"Yeah, but not of each floor. Like I said, I just kind of copied down points of interest as I passed them." He offered her the well-worn piece of paper, and her eyes were scanning it even before she'd snatched it out of his grip.  
>"So you got as far as floor 20?"<br>"Got a bit distracted by the ruins on that floor. Never got farther. I meant to, though!" He pulled down his hat to obscure his embarrassed expression, but Angela was barely paying attention to him.  
>"Don't you remember floor 19?" She didn't wait for his response as she blathered on. "It's filled with mushrooms, always! Some power of the Goddess or natural things or something makes them grow daily! Like, super quickly! We have a reliable food source!"<br>"Aren't some of them poison—"  
>"It's easy to tell them apart from the healthy ones. When I was poor, I practically lived off of these. I got rich selling them, too." Angela's eyes, once she lifted them from the map, practically shone with hope.<br>"Aw, that's great. You might make a pretty good adventurer too, Angela."  
>"If we live through this, yeah."<p>

* * *

><p>Despite the whole "we're trapped in a mine and can't get out" thing, the first week wasn't so terrible, survival-wise. They were careful to save their food and water and split it nicely between them. Angela followed her own advice and tore her change of clothes apart and turned it into a blanket the couple could share in the less-than-tropical mines. Every day, Angela and Calvin would pack up their tiny camp and journey to the nineteenth floor together, wisely using the buddy system while they gathered mushrooms. After they had rested from the back-breaking work, they traveled back up to the tenth floor and set up camp again. All this packing and repacking wasn't dreary, considering their "camp" consisted of unfolding the camp stove, laying out the blanket and setting their respective rucksacks down. For dinner, Angela would prepare a slice of bread with cooked mushrooms on the side for each failed miner. Breakfast was another slice of bread smeared with a bit of marmalade or jam or whatever. Trail mix was used to snack on if they got particularly tired, and they celebrated Calvin's birthday with a can of ravioli cooked in a conveniently shaped rock Angela discovered early on in their adventure.<br>Calvin and Angela got along remarkably well considering their predicament, though this was hardly surprising considering their "slightly more than best friends" status. But after the third week was coming to a close, and as neither islander was looking forward to spending New Year 's Eve in Ganache Mine, even their patience was running thin.  
>"Calvin," Angela said slowly one morning as they began folding up camp for the day's work, "there's no more trail mix."<br>"What?"  
>"What happened to all the trail mix, Calvin?" True enough, Angela was holding a suspiciously flat bag of the nutty stuff in her hand as she spun around to glare at the man. Calvin cracked an eye open from where he was lying (as he had yet to get out of bed) to look at it.<br>"Oh, yeah. I woke up last night hungry and wanted to eat something."  
>Indescribable rage filled Angela's tiny frame. "You were <em>hungry<em> and wanted to _eat_ something?"  
>"Well, yeah." Calvin only blinked at her, and Angela had to repress the very strong urge to smack him.<br>"We're _both_ hungry, Calvin! Just because you're _hungry_ doesn't mean you go and eat our trail mix! Goddess, I thought you were an adventurer! You should _know_ this!"  
>"Yeah, well, I'm tired of eating mushrooms all the time!"<br>Angela could only stare before she remembered how to use her tongue. "Okay, Calvin? The mushrooms are saving our lives right now. I'm tired of eating them too, but I also like living a lot."  
>Calvin grumbled something indecipherable and rolled the other way to sleep a bit longer. Angela sighed and rolled the empty package into a ball before shoving it into the bottom of her pack. There was nothing she could do about it now, and besides, at least there wasn't much more Calvin could filch. She understood his frustration—he'd never been stranded for more than two weeks, after all, and never in such dire circumstances. She couldn't blame him for being upset.<br>It wasn't long after that before tragedy struck again. The pair was scavenging for mushrooms on the nineteenth floor, as usual, when the mines began growling in a now-familiar way. Angela and Calvin glanced at each other in alarm before running in separate ways towards each set of stairs. "No, Angela!" Calvin yelled across the space. "You don't want to go up, you'll get crushed!" Angela ran towards him as fast as adrenaline would allow, and they both slid down to the 20th floor just as a huge rock fell through a pitfall above and flattened the stairs they'd just escaped from, much like the first time.  
>"Good thing we always bring our camp with us, huh?" Calvin laughed bitterly, but Angela only stared, brokenhearted, at the many boulders once again barring their way to freedom.<br>"We're never getting out of here, are we?" she asked, but Calvin didn't answer her and began setting up camp. The ex-farmer slid to her knees and began crying.  
>Calvin looked up from his work briefly to scold her for wasting water before he realized that she was flat-out weeping.<br>"This is my fault," she sobbed. "All this is happening because I didn't make all the rainbows! The earth is still weak! I should have worked harder at saving the Harvest Goddess! Something's punishing me for not working harder!"  
>The explorer dropped their packs and moved to hold her close. The weeping woman only wailed and clung to him like he was just an object to seek comfort from. "The rainbows!" she cried like a madwoman. "I just needed a few more rainbows!" Calvin said nothing, only rocked her back and forth, knowing that it was just as well the madness take her now, as it would eventually come to take the both of them.<p>

* * *

><p>"I gave you a gift once," Calvin suddenly piped up however many days later. Angela glanced up at him, her once-bright eyes now dull with misery. Their hair was longer and lank now, and mine dust streaked their skin like gray tattoos.<br>"How thoughtful of you."  
>"It was limestone, remember?" he continued, well aware of the fact that he was, in all likelihood, talking to himself. "I found it in the mines."<br>"Interesting."  
>"So that means that a lot of this rock must be limestone, as well!"<br>"Do you often like to make pointless comments about your surroundings, or is that a recent development?"  
>"No, you don't understand," he continued eagerly, biting the last of his bread with emphasis. The last of the bread, to be precise. "Depending on acidity levels and the like, water can break limestone down! This is a farming island, right? So you must use pesticides!"<br>Angela only stared at him. "That's hurtful to nature. We don't do that here."  
>Calvin felt his hope drain, and with it his mind pressing against the wall separating it from blissful madness. "Well, the water might still be acidic. If there's limestone in these mines, that means there's a natural water source nearby."<br>Angela stared at him for a few moments and, perturbed, he stared back. After a while, she began packing everything up again and laughed once. "There is, sure. 30th floor. I could use a bath. But you won't find our way out with that water, Mr. Chemist. It's completely pure. One of the King Fish lives there."  
>Calvin didn't say anything, but collapsed his head into his hands in despair. Another dusty chuckle from Angela made him lift his head again.<br>"Seems we'll be heading there anyway. Let's pack up camp and move to the 25th floor. We'll be closer to the water that way, since we've got no more water of our own. Plus, there are moles on that floor."  
>"On the 30th floor? Why is that important?"<br>"No, on the 25th. And the moles sure are important because we just ate the last of our food supply."  
>Mining all five floors down was taxing on its own, but doing so without hope of any food was even more difficult. When they finally collapsed amidst the sparkling piles of minerals, seeing the dancing ring in front of them was like a gift from the Goddess herself.<br>"Mushrooms," Angela's parched lips mouthed. She and Calvin turned to each other and started giggling like the crazed hermits they'd become. Even better, a mole chose that moment to peek its head out, and it barely required any energy for Angela to reach out her hammer and smack it on the head. While it was still dazed, she drew out her axe and viciously sliced its head off. Calvin was already setting up the camp stove with shaking fingers as Angela carried the corpse over to him. He finally lit the flame, then drew out his machete and started skinning the animal as well as he could.  
>"You know if it's safe to eat?" he asked her.<br>"Dunno. Oh, Goddess, Calvin; _meat!_" Her mouth was already salivating at the thought, despite the fact that her potential meal was currently wet with blood.  
>Hunger makes the best sauce, so the trapped islanders had no true way to tell if moles are actually good eating. It was a small creature, but after weeks of eating molding bread slathered with jam, any bit of meat with cooked mushrooms—such a delicacy, those things—was like ambrosia.<br>They survived like that for who knew how long. It was lucky they'd had cold medicine on hand, because one time while mole-hunting Angela had smashed her hammer into a stone blocking her way, and it had released some type of nasty gas that had given her a deadly sore throat. Though she was lucky, it was the last bottle of medicine they had, and so mole-hunting had become a sport to be played only when well-rested. The lake a few floors down had been a delight, and bathing after months of filth had been pure ecstasy for the both of them. Moles were in abundance on their new home, and they had even joked that they could even get a little family going. Unfortunately, the deeper one went in the mine, the darker it became, so the jokes had nasty little barbs in them, like saying the children would be born blind or without eyes.  
>But they got along, somehow. One day, while searching in her pack for the last lick of jam, Angela had discovered a whole bar of chocolate. The mines weren't exactly Toucan Island weather, and the bar had been stored in a far pocket, so thankfully it hadn't melted yet. Angela showed it off to Calvin with a barbaric whoop of joy, and they enjoyed it as a dessert after their typical mole-and-mushroom banquet.<br>In such conditions, however, everything cannot always be perfect. In fact, usually the experiences are terrible followed by a pocket of joy, followed by worse. Naturally, Angela and Calvin were no exception to this cursed "rule".  
>It was at the end of this delicious feast that the mines began rumbling again in a tune that was becoming horrifyingly common. Calvin and Angela watched the blood drain out of the other's face as horror created temporary paralysis. Their delay was quickly punished. The first of the boulders that they knew were coming neatly landed on top of their Goddess-given camp stove, and it was after that tragedy that they were quick to pack their things again. Like the last thousand times, they raced down the stairs as the aforementioned steps were bombarded behind them, and unlike the last thousand times, they found themselves at the bottom of the mines, with nowhere else to run.<br>They positioned themselves in the farthest corner away from the destroyed stairs as possible, shivering. Just like that, the careful barriers they'd created to separate their sanity from madness shattered once the trapped feelings finally made themselves known.  
>"What are we going to do, Calvin?" Her shrieks sounded almost bat-like in the darkness. So far down, the boulders barely allowed any light to peek through at all. She could barely even see her partner. Somewhere in the fleeing process, he'd lost his hat, and now his hair hung long and snarly around his neck.<br>Freakily, he only laughed. It wasn't just a snicker or a derisive chuckle; it was a hard, belly laugh that filled the chambers with its music. "What are we going to do?" he parroted. "We're going to rot, that's what we'll do. We're going to start our little cave colony and hope to survive, making love to keep ourselves warm, like in the bad camping stories! Sound appetizing to you?"  
>Animalistic fear began rising in Angela's stomach. <em>Get away from this man,<em> her instincts were screaming at her.  
>There was nowhere to run.<br>"Little cave children!" he screamed at her. She could see the glint of his teeth in the dying light, whether they were bared in a snarl or a smile she didn't know. "Little blind cave children! Nothing to see at all! Nothing to eat! Oh, Goddess, I'm so hungry!"  
>Another glint, another sound. His machete being drawn from its well-worn sheath. Her feet began moving without any orders from her brain, and they kept moving until she felt a hard <em>smack<em> of cave wall against human head. She saw stars swim in front of her eyes, but she hadn't seen real stars in months; years, maybe.  
>Calvin was much, much too close now. "Wouldn't want to make the little cave children jealous, now, would we, Angela?" he asked her. A third glint, a final glint in her dazed vision. The tip of his knife glittered in the last twinkles of light seeping in through the rocks above, and then all she knew was pain in her eyes. Not just in her eyes, <em>in<em> her eyes, and then suddenly her eyes weren't there, and you'd think that would stop the pain, but it kept digging and digging and _digging_ and she screamed and the pain still didn't stop, and finally her tortured mind and body couldn't take it anymore and let her slip into blessed unconsciousness.  
>Calvin held the two bloody orbs in one fist in triumph. He wasn't quite sure what he'd just done, but his mind was telling him that it was right, somehow. Hand clenched in front of him, his trophy held high, his face screamed victory to the heavens, the skies that he would never see again. Another disapproving rumble rang above him, and he glanced, confused, at the ceiling before the boulder fell through. It crushed his skull and toes and all the bones in between, and then more fell, crushing everything around him and on top of him…except for Angela. The rocks formed a perfect little shelter complete with a roof, nicely airtight to protect Angela from anything else. Like the Goddess had finally taken pity on the poor girl and was granting her the blissful sleep she'd asked for since the first earthquake.<br>Angela dreamed of the warm sun searing her vision away as the oxygen ran out.

**AN: Good thing Natsume owns this and not me, right? I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about the ridiculousness of this glitch, and we got to joking about how you stay trapped...slowly going crazy...making a funny cave colony with kids born without eyes? Said friend and I agreed this was hilarious, so I wrote this. It ended up being a little creepier than I'd expected, so I decided to kind of...not include the funny cave colony, on account of it might not being as hysterical as I'd thought. Anyway, Calvin is probably horribly out of character since I barely speak to him, so I apologise for wasting your time. Wasn't gonna post this, but, you know...**


End file.
